Here is the link to the podcast entitled How Instagram Took Over the World. I highly recommend listening to it in its entirety. There is much to learned from the very insightful Mr. Krieger about the constantly changing world of startups. My admiration and gratitude to both him and Mr. Thompson for such a lively and engaging presentation.

Here is a brief summary of the subjects covered in the order they were discussed:

Instagram originally began as an app called “Burbn”. It was not being used much at the time, but its photo-posting feature immediately drew the most interest of its initial users. The knowledge gained from the experience with Burbn became the foundation upon which Instagram was later built.¹

The co-founders’ key concerns all along have been ease-of-use in getting photos uploaded as quickly as possible and making them look good with the available filters and features.

When Instagram first launched, it very quickly gained an international audience. It generated early excitement because there were no language barriers in following other users. One of the initial and inspiring experiences of early users was following and supporting the rescue efforts after the 2011 tsunami in Japan.

At first, the co-founders were completely focused upon building the app’s infrastructure.

The media initially perceived the app as “something for hipsters”. In fact, a wide diversity of users was genuinely connecting with each other.

The co-founders needed to become well versed in copyright matters, as the users, not Instagram, own their photos. This included the provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Facebook purchased Instagram for approximately $1 billion in 2012. ² While FB’s philosophy is generally to get new projects implemented quickly online, Instagram prefers to take more time with their new upgrades and features to make certain they are done right.

Instagram has always been a “cohesive experience for users”.

Instagram has “changed the world” insofar as people “have a desire to tell stories”, and the app and others like it are “immediate and visceral”. Essentially, it enables users to “bring others into the moment”.

The ease-of-use of the app in getting photos uploaded quickly also permits users to “get back into your life” rather than taking too much time with the technology. In effect, taking more time to directly view and experience what a user has photographed after the photos have been easily uploaded and the phone put aside.

Both of Instagram’s founders, Michael Krieger and Kevin Systrom, have always gotten along well during the 6-year history of their company. Their respective skills in business and technology have always complemented each other.

The founders have always maintained two guiding principles in their work:

Do the simple things first.

In terms of craft and design, do fewer things better.

The biggest challenge for startups today is getting noticed as marketing and distribution have become more difficult.

2. The Wall Street Journal’s coverage, as just one representative news media source among, appeared in an article published on April 10, 2012, entitled Insta-Rich: $1 Billion for Instagram, by Shayndi Raice and Spencer E. Ante.

When people are dating it is often said that they are looking for “Mr. Right” or “Ms. Right”. That is, finding someone who is just the right romantic match for them.

In the case of today’s rapid development, experimentation and implementation of blockchain technology, if a startup’s new technology takes hold, it might soon find a highly productive (but maybe not so romantic) match in finding Mr. or Ms. [literal] Right by deploying the blockchain as a form of global registry of creative works ownership.

Applications of blockchain technology for the potential management of economic and distribution benefits of “creative professions”, including writers, musicians and others, that have been significantly affected by prolific online file copying still remains relatively unexplored. As a result, they do not yet have the means to “prove and protect ownership” of their work. Moreover, they do have an adequate system to monetize their digital works. But the blockchain, by virtue of its structural and operational nature, can supply these creators with “provenance, identity and micropayments“. (See also the October 27, 2015 Subway Fold post entitled Summary of the Bitcoin Seminar Held at Kaye Scholer in New York on October 15, 2015 for some background on these three elements.)

Now on to the efforts of a startup called Mine ( @mine_labs ), co-founded by Jesse Walden and Denis Nazarov¹. They are preparing to launch a new metadata protocol called Mediachain that enables creators working in digital media to write data describing their work along with a timestamp directly onto the blockchain. (Yet another opportunity to go out on a sort of, well, date.) This system is based upon the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). Mine believes that IPSF is a “more readable format” than others presently available.

Walden thinks that Mediachain’s “decentralized nature”, rather than a more centralized model, is critical to its objectives. Previously, a very “high-profile” somewhat similar initiative to establish a similarly global “database of musical rights and works” called the Global Repertoire Database (GDR) had failed.

(Mine maintains this page of a dozen recent posts on Medium.com about their technology that provides some interesting perspectives and details about the Mediachain project.)

Mediachain’s Objectives

Walden and Nazarov have tried to innovate by means of changing how media businesses interact with the Internet, as opposed to trying to get them to work within its established standards. Thus, the Mediachain project has emerged with its focal point being the inclusion of descriptive data and attribution for image files by combining blockchain technology and machine learning². As well, it can accommodate reverse queries to identify the creators of images.

Nazarov views Mediachain “as a global rights database for images”. When used in conjunction with, among others, Instagram, he and Walden foresee a time when users of this technology can retrieve “historic information” about a file. By doing so, they intend to assist in “preserving identity”, given the present challenges of enforcing creator rights and “monetizing content”. In the future, they hope that Mediachain inspires the development of new platforms for music and movies that would permit ready access to “identifying information for creative works”. According to Walden, their objective is to “unbundle identity and distribution” and provide the means to build new and more modern platforms to distribute creative works.

Potential Applications for Public Institutions

Mine’s co-founders believe that there is further meaningful potential for Mediachain to be used by public organizations who provide “open data sets for images used in galleries, libraries and archives”. For example:

The Metropolitan Museum of Art (“The Met” as it is referred to on their website and by all of my fellow New York City residents), has a mandate to license the metadata about the contents of their collections. The museum might have a “metadata platform” of its own to host many such projects.

The New York Public Library has used their own historical images, that are available to the public to, among other things, create maps.³Nazarov and Walden believe they could “bootstrap the effort” by promoting Mediachain’s expanded apps in “consumer-facing projects”.

Maintaining the Platform Security, Integrity and Extensibility

Prior to Mediachain’s pending launch, Walden and Nazarov are highly interested in protecting the platform’s legitimate users from “bad actors” who might wrongfully claim ownership of others’ rightfully owned works. As a result, to ensure the “trust of its users”, their strategy is to engage public institutions as a model upon which to base this. Specifically, Mine’s developers are adding key functionality to Mediachain that enables the annotation of images.

The new platform will also include a “reputation system” so that subsequent users will start to “trust the information on its platform”. In effect, their methodology empowers users “to vouch for a metadata’s correctness”. The co-founders also believe that the “Mediachain community” will increase or decrease trust in the long-term depending on how it operates as an “open access resource”. Nazarov pointed to the success of Wikipedia to characterize this.

Following the launch of Mediachain, the startup’s team believes this technology could be integrated into other existing social media sites such as the blogging platform Tumblr. Here they think it would enable users to search images including those that may have been subsequently altered for various purposes. As a result, Tumblr would then be able to improve its monetization efforts through the application of better web usage analytics.

The same level of potential, by virtue of using Mediachain, may likewise be found waiting on still other established social media platforms. Nazarov and Walden mentioned seeing Apple and Facebook as prospects for exploration. Nazarov said that, for instance, Coindesk.com could set its own terms for its usage and consumption on Facebook Instant Articles (a platform used by publishers to distribute their multimedia content on FB). Thereafter, Mediachain could possibly facilitate the emergence of entirely new innovative media services.

Nazarov and Walden temper their optimism because the underlying IPFS basis is so new and acceptance and adoption of it may take time. As well, they anticipate “subsequent issues” concerning the platform’s durability and the creation of “standards for metadata”. Overall though, they remain sanguine about Mediachain’s prospects and are presently seeking developers to embrace these challenges.

How would applications built upon Mediachain affect or integrate with digital creative works distributed by means of a Creative Commons license?

What new entrepreneurial opportunities for startup services might arise if this technology eventually gains web-wide adoption and trust among creative communities? For example, would lawyers and accountants, among many others, with clients in the arts need to develop and offer new forms of guidance and services to navigate a Mediachain-enabled marketplace?

How and by whom should standards for using Mediachain and other potential development path splits (also known as “forks“), be established and managed with a high level of transparency for all interested parties?

Does analogizing what Bitcoin is to the blockchain also hold equally true for what Mediachain is to the blockchain, or should alternative analogies and perspectives be developed to assist in the explanation, acceptance and usage of this new platform?

1. This link from Mine’s website is to an article entitled Introducing Mediachain by Denis Nazarov, originally published on Medium.com on January 2, 2016. He mentions in his text an earlier startup called Diaspora that ultimately failed in its attempt at creating something akin to the Mediachain project. This December 4, 2014 Subway Fold post entitled Book Review of “More Awesome Than Money” concerned a book that expertly explored the fascinating and ultimately tragic inside story of Diaspora.

2. Many of the more than two dozen Subway Fold posts in the category of Smart Systems cover some of the recent news, trends and applications in machine learning.

As incredibly vast as New York City is, it has always been a great place to walk around. Its multitude of wonderfully diverse neighborhoods, streets, buildings, parks, shops and endless array of other sites can always be more fully appreciated going on foot here and there in – – as we NYC natives like call it – – “The City”.

The April 26, 2015 edition of The New York Times Magazine was devoted to this tradition. The lead off piece by Steve Duenes was entitled How to Walk in New York. This was followed by several other pieces and then reports on 15 walks around specific neighborhoods. (Clicking on the Magazine’s link above and then scrolling down to the second and third pages will produce links to nearly all of these articles.) I was thrilled by reading this because I am such an avid walker myself.

The very next day, on May 27, 2015, Wired.com carried a fascinating story about how one of the issues’ accompanying and rather astonishing supporting graphics was actually done in a report by Angela Watercutter entitled How the NY Times is Sparking the VR Journalism Revolution. But even that’s not the half of it – – the NYTimes has made available for downloading a full virtual reality file of the full construction and deconstruction of the graphic. The Wired.com post contains the link as well as a truly mind-boggling high-speed YouTube video of the graphic’s rapid appearance and disappearance and a screen capture from the VR file itself. (Is “screen capture” really accurate to describe it or is something more like “VR frame”?) This could take news reporting into an entirely new dimension where viewers literally go inside of a story.

This all began on April 11, 2015 when a French artist named JR pieced together and then removed in less than 24 hours, a 150-foot photograph right across the street from the landmark Flatiron Building. This New York Times commissioned image was of “a 20-year-old Azerbaijani immigrant named Elmar Aliyev”. It was used on the cover of this special NYTimes Magazine edition. Upon its completion JR then photographed from a helicopter hovering above. (See the March 19, 2015 Subway Fold post entitled Spectacular Views of New York, San Francisco and Las Vegas at Night from 7,500 Feet Up for another innovative project inject involving highly advanced photography of New York also taken from a helicopter.)

The NYTimes deployed VR technology from a company called VRSE.tools to transform this whole artistic experience into a fully immersive presentation entitled Walking New York. The paper introduced this new creation at a news conference on April 27th. To summarize the NYTimes Magazine’s editor-in-chief, Jake Silverstein, this project was chosen for a VR implementation because it would so dramatically enhance a viewer’s experience of it. Otherwise, pedestrians walking over the image across the sidewalk would not nearly get the full effect of it.

Viewing Walking New York in full VR mode will require an app from VRSE’s site (linked above), and a VR viewer such as, among others, Google Cardboard.

The boost to VR as an emerging medium by the NYTimes‘ engagement on this project is quite significant. Moreover, this demonstrates how it can now be implemented in journalism. Mr. Silverman, to paraphrase his points of view, believes this demonstrates how it can be used to literally and virtually bring someone into a story. Furthermore, by doing so, the effect upon the VR viewer is likely to be an increased amount of empathy for certain individuals and circumstances who are the subjects of these more immersive reports.

There will more than likely be a long way to go before “VR filming rigs” can be sent out by news organizations to cover stories as they occur. The hardware is just now that widespread or mainstream yet. As well, the number of people who are trained and know how to use this equipment is still quite small and, even for those who do, preparing such a virtual presentation lags behind today’s pace of news reporting.

Let’s assume that out on the not too distant horizon that VR journalism gains acceptance, its mobility and ease-of-use increases, and the rosters of VR-trained reporters and producers increases so that this field undergoes some genuine economies of scale. Then, as with many other life cycles of emergent technologies, the applications in this nascent field would only become limited by the imaginations by its professionals and their audiences. My questions are as follows:

What if the leading social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook (which already purchased Oculus, the maker of VR headsets for $2B last year), LinkedIn, Instagram (VR Instgramming, anyone?), and others integrate VR into their capabilities? For example, Twitter has recently added a live video feature called Periscope that its users have quickly and widely embraced. In fact, it is already being used for live news reporting as users turn their phones towards live events as they happen. Would they just as likely equally swarm to VR?

What if new startup social media platforms launch that are purely focused on experiencing news, commentary, and discussion in VR?

Will previously unanticipated ethical standards be needed and likewise dilemmas result as journalists move up the experience curve with VR?

[This post was originally uploaded on September 26, 2014. It has been updated below with new information on February 5, 2015.]

Have you ever wondered what a visual map of your Twitter network might look like? The realization of such Twitter topography was covered in a terrific post on September 24, 2014 on socialmediatoday.com entitled How to Create a Visual Map of Your Twitter Network by Mary Ellen Egan.

To briefly sum up, at the recent Social Shake-Up Conference in Atlanta sponsored by SocialMediaToday, the Social Research Foundation created and presented such a map. They generated it by including 513 Twitter users who participated for four days in the hashtag #socialshakeup. The platform used is called NodeXL. The resulting graphic of the results as shown in this article are extraordinary. Please pay particular attention as to how the “influencers” in this network are identified and their characteristics. I strongly urge you to click through to read this article and see this display.

I believe this article and report will quite likely spark your imagination. I think it is safe to assume that many users would be intrigued by this capability and, moreover, would devise new and innovative ways to leverage the data to better understand, grow and plot strategy to enhance their Twitter networks. Some questions I propose for such an analysis while inspecting a Twitter map include:

Am I reaching my target audience? Is this map reliable as a sole indicator or should others be used?

Who are the key influencers in my network? Once identified, can it be determined why they are influencers?

Does my growth strategy depend on promoting retweets, growing the population of followers, getting mentioned in relevant publications and websites, or other possible approaches?

What I would really be like to see emerge is a 3-dimensional form of visual map that fully integrates multiple maps of an individual’s or group’s or company’s online presence to simultaneously include their Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn¹, Instagram and other social networks. Maybe a platform like the Hyve-3D visualization system² could be used to enable a more broadly extensible and scalable 3D view. Perhaps this multi-dimensional virtual construct could produce entirely new planning and insights for optimizing one’s presence, marketing and influence in social media.

If so, would new trends and influencers not previously seen then be identified? Could tools be developed in this system whereby users would test the strengths and weaknesses of certain cross-social media platforms links and relationships? Would certain industries such news networks³ be able to spot events and trends much sooner? Are there any potentially new opportunities here for entrepreneurs?

February 5, 2015 Update:

A very instructive and illuminating example of the power of mapping a specialized Twitter network has just been posted by Ryan Whelan, a law and doctoral student at Northwestern University. It is composed of US law school professors who are now actively Tweeting away. He posted his methodology, an interactive graphic of this network, and one supporting graph plus four data tables on his blog in a February 3, 2015 post entitled The Law Prof Twitter Network 2.0. I highly recommend clicking through and reading this in its entirety. Try clicking on the graphic to activate a set of tools to explore and query this network map. As well, the tables illustrate the relative sensitivities of the data and their impact on the graphic when particular members of the network or the origins and groupings of the followers is examined.

I think you find it inspiring in thinking about what situations such a network map might be helpful to you in work, school, special interest groups, and many other potential applications. Mr. Whelan presents plenty of information to get you started off in the right direction.

I also found the look and feel of the network map to be very similar to the network mapping tool that was previously available on LinkedIn and discussed in the August 14, 2014 Subway Fold post entitled 2014 LinkedIn Usage Trends and Additional Data Questions.

My questions are as follows:

What effects, if any, is this network and its structure having upon improving the legal education system? That is, are these professors, by being active on Twitter in their own handle and as members of this network as followers of each other, benefiting the professor’s work and/or law students’ classroom and learning experiences?

Are the characteristics of this network of legal academics any different from, let’s say, a Twitter network of medical school professors or high school teachers?

Would more of a meta-study of networks within the legal profession produce results that would be helpful to lawyers and their clients? For example, what would Twitter maps of corporate lawyers, litigators and public interest attorneys show that might be helpful and to whom?

3. See also a most interesting article published in the September 23, 2014 edition of The New York Times entitled Tool Called Dataminr Hunts for News in the Din of Twitter by Leslie Kaufman about such a system that is scanning and interpolating possible news emerging from the Twitter-sphere.

The who, what, where and when of the news business has been dramatically transformed by the exponential growth of social media. The instantaneous reporting and viral spread of events happening everywhere across the globe is being enabled by the giants of this industry including, among others, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram. Moreover, not only are these platforms acquiring and disseminating news at web-speed, they are often shaping the news and, even in some instances, affecting its outcomes.

Two very compelling and highly related posts have appeared online within the past five days that provide an opportunity to examine this rapidly evolving phenomenon. In both cases, I very highly recommend clicking through and reading both of these in their entirety. I will recap, annotate and add some questions to these posts to start off this topic.

According to this report, the increasing velocity of change occurring in social technology (as well as mobile¹), is deeply affecting the distribution of news and, moreover, how journalists are doing their jobs. To study this in-depth for the US market, Edelman worked with two startups called NewsWhip and Muck Rack. Their study focused on a series of highly shared articles in six topic areas. In turn, their findings were used to create a survey distributed to 250 journalists. Among the survey’s participants the findings were as follows:

More than 75% of those surveyed now took their stories’ social sharing potential into consideration.

The addition of multimedia, reducing copy length, reporting locally, and “more use of human voice and a proximity to trending topics” are being deployed in efforts to raise social sharing.

Almost 75% are adding supplemental videos

They also identified the leading current trends as “more mobile friendly content, faster turnaround times, more original video, smaller newsroom staff and social media growing in influence”.

Edelman will soon publish a more detailed analysis of their data in order to plot the “genome” of a news story being shared across social media. Until then, their “top line analysis” showed that Facebook is the leading social platform for news sharing, with the greatest sources of shares upon it being The Huffington Post (which also ranked highest for video shares), BuzzFeed, Mashable and PlayBuzz; on Twitter, the leading sources come from the BBC, The New York Times and Mashable; and on LinkedIn they are Forbes, The New York Times and Business Insider.

This post then includes a well designed and embedded infographic² clearly delineating the four major trends in Edelman’s study and their conclusions termed “Storytelling Takeaway” for each one. This could be quite helpful to people working in many sectors of news reporting, delivery and strategy.

Social media and news-parsing algorithms have created a whole new universe of “intermediaries between the media and their audiences” who are affecting the production and selection of news. The participants in the news industry must therefore devise and implement strategies that integrate all of these factors to reach their critical goals of being distinguishable and indeed heard at a time of ever-increasing competition for their audience’s attention.

The second post that I found to be helpful in trying to understanding the latest developments here is entitled How Much Work the NYT Has to Do on Social Sharing, in One Chart, by Matthew Ingram on Gigaom.com on January 19, 2015. This is Ingram’s follow up to his earlier post on Gigaom.com on January 14, 2015 entitled News Flash for the NYT: You and BuzzFeed Aren’t That Different in which he argued that both media companies were essentially in the same business, despite their differing demographics and content. Moreover, that BuzzFeed was winning in its efforts to understand and leverage social platforms. Both posts cover a number of challenging issues and referring links to other posts about the very nature, value and processes of the social sharing of news stories and related content.

In regards the writer’s latter post, he ties to strengthen his analysis by presenting two data graphics that compare social news sharing data for both BuzzFeed and NYTimes.com, as well as six other competing news sites. The first is entitled “Mean and average number of shares per article November 2014”. As between the two measurements, the mean for BuzzFeed was 7950 and then 851 for NYTimes.com, while the median for them, respectively, was 966 and 11. Focusing more on the median figures, Ingram concluded that the degree of social sharing of a BuzzFeed article is nearly 100 times greater than that of a NYTimes.com article. (Just to be picky about it, 966/11 = 87.8 or just about 88 times greater.)

Ingram cites and links to a blog post on January 16, 2015 on Medium.com entitled No, BuzzFeed Isn’t “Beating” the New York Times by Simon Owens, rebutting his own conclusions. Owen points to a number of other factors such as content, revenue models and streams, marketing segments, and corporate histories. For him, article sharing data is interesting, but not, in and of itself, positive proof of the two companies being in the same business. Ingram reiterates his opinion that whether visitors are paying for content or not, the understanding social distribution is still important and that the NYTimes.com “needs to step up its game” in this regard.

Ingram concludes with another bar chart entitled “Distribution of articles shared” wherein the same eight news sites are measured in regards to the percentages of their articles that are, according to set numerical criteria, either “Unnoticed”, “Popular”, “Undershared”, “Viral” or “Niche”. With regard to “Unnoticed”, the NYTimes data point is approximately 65% while BuzzFeed is approximately 12%. BuzzFeed also has higher percentages of it articles in the “Viral”, “Popular” and “Niche” categories than the NYTimes.com.

My own questions are as follows:

What refinements, if any, are needed to tweak these analytics in order to better measure and assess the degree and strategic value of a news website’s social sharing?

Does a higher level of social sharing necessarily correlate to higher revenues?

Assuming that a higher level of social sharing exists for Site A, will Site B with a lower level of social sharing still possibly be able to generate more revenue than Site A because its sharing is concentrated among consumers more likely to purchase Site B’s good and services? That is, does each social share for Site B somehow have intrinsically more value that a social share for Site A?

Should market planners, demographers, and content strategists plan their budgets and business campaigns focused only upon increased social sharing numbers, or is this just another variable to be weighted accordingly and then plugged into a spreadsheet in combinations with many other variables? (For any Excel enthusiasts, wouldn’t this make for an interesting application of a pivot table to tabulate and test this data?)

Remember back in high school when some teacher insisted that “science is fun” followed up by the inevitable directive to “pay attention and learn something”, all of which was about as well received by most of the class as a tooth ache?

Well, at least for some of us, the fun never left. Moreover, it has recently been revitalized by virtue of PBS’s recent TV series and the simultaneous publication of an accompanying book entitled How We Got to Now (Riverhead Books, 2014) , both hosted and written by the renowned and bestselling science author Steven Johnson. In each of the episodes and corresponding chapters, Johnson masterfully examines how innovations in glass, cold, sound, clean, time and light have evolved over the centuries to bring us into modern times. His onscreen and in-print enthusiasm, insight and eloquence make for an enlightening experience from start to finish.

Focusing particularly on merits of the book, the entire package of the author’s accessible and evocative prose plus the generous helpings of photos and graphics have produced a work of science literature to behold. It is one of those uncommon instances where vivid narrations of science history combined with original analyses and supporting visuals take immediate hold of the reader’s imagination during every one of the six spheres of discovery. Clearly, he worked very hard to get all of this just right.

The most impressive accomplishment is how Johnson positions and threads several consistent themes throughout his text. First, is a phenomenon that lies at the very heart of this book: Innovations made to solve problem X often have completely unforeseen results upon issue Y. Just one of many extraordinary examples cited in every chapter involves the creation of a “flash light” by the famous muckraking writer and photographer Jacob Riis that enabled his to dramatically document the interiors of the squalid slums in New York with photographs in the late 19th century that later led to social reforms.

Second, inventors and their innovations benefit from networks of ideas and among like-minded entrepreneurs and scientists. This allows for new ideas to more readily be pollinated among innovators. Along similar lines, new breakthroughs often result in improvements and/or combinations built upon earlier and, at times, unappreciated advances. The author points to, among others, Thomas Edison and Steve Jobs in this regard.

Third, innovators can be through of as “time travelers” who are so ahead of their time that the world is just not ready to appreciate and implement their work until years later when new and wholly unanticipated needs arise. Johnson concludes his book with the compelling story of how Lady Ada Lovelace developed the world’s first computer code while working with Charles Babbage on what historians consider to be the world’s first mechanical computing device, during the 1840’s and 1850’s. Who knew that their work would not be fully comprehended let alone implemented until more than a century later? No need to look any further than at the nearest desktop/tablet/smartphone to see what they ultimately have wrought across the entire world.

While this book is so thoroughly grand in its scope across six sectors of innovation including items ranging from the finely carved oil lamps in King Tut’s tomb to posting selfies on Instagram and many other world-changing leaps in between, it nonetheless steadily maintains a personally boundless and infectious sense of wonder about the world. In so doing this, Johnson’s text effortlessly moves back and forth between a close-up examinations of specific new developments and then focusing on the cumulative perspective of how all of these advances continue to coalesce and evolve on a global scale. Indeed, for regular fans of quality science literature as well as for those readers who would otherwise prefer reading a grocery list to anything scientific, this book fully and expertly asks and answers just exactly how we got to now.